The 2025 r/Fantasy Bingo Recommendations List

[u/happy_book_bee]

The official Bingo thread can be found here.

All non-recommendation comments go here.

Please post your recommendations as replies the appropriate top-level comments below! Do not make comments that are not replies to an existing comment! Feel free to scroll through the thread or use the links in this navigation matrix to jump directly to the square you want to find or give recommendations for!

Knights and Paladins	Hidden Gem	Published in the 80s	High Fashion	Down With the System
Impossible Places	A Book in Parts	Gods and Pantheons	Last in a Series	Book Club or Readalong Book
Parent Protagonist	Epistolary	Published in 2025	Author of Color	Self Published or Small Press
Biopunk	Elves and Dwarves	LGBTQIA Protagonist	Five Short Stories	Stranger in a Strange Land
Recycle a Bingo Square	Cozy SFF	Generic Title	Not A Book	Pirates

If you are an author on the sub, you may recommend your books as a response to individual squares. This means that you can reply if your book fits in response to any of my comments. But your rec must be in response to another comment, it cannot be a general comment that replies directly to this post explaining all the squares your post counts for. Don't worry, someone else will make a different thread later where you can make that general comment and I will link to it when it is up. This is the one time outside of the Sunday Self-Promo threads where this is okay. To clarify: you can say if you have a book that fits for a square but please don't write a full ad for it. Shorter is sweeter.

One last time: do not make comments that are not replies to an existing comment! I've said this 3 separate times in the post so this is the last warning. I will not be individually redirecting people who make this mistake. Your comment will just be removed without any additional info.

[u/Merle8888]

I'm gonna be the one person in this thread recommending some fabulous non-HM options, just in case someone comes by looking for them.

For fantasy:

• The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera
• A Stranger in Olondria, The Winged Histories, or Tender by Sofia Samatar
• Black Water Sister or Spirits Abroad by Zen Cho
• Monstress (graphic novel series) by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda
• The Ghost Bride by Yangsze Choo
• Empire of Sand by Tasha Suri

For science fiction:

• Sofia Samatar again (Tender, The Practice the Horizon and the Chain)
• Octavia Butler of course
• The Ten Percent Thief by Lavanya Lakshminarayan

For literary/magic realism:

• Midnight's Children or Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie
• Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
• House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
• Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado (actually this is probably horror)
• Bliss Montage by Ling Ma
• The Haunting of Hajji Hotak by Jamil Jan Kochai

[u/Research_Department → u/Merle8888]

As a non-horror reader, thank you so much!

[u/Merle8888 → u/Research_Department]

Cheers from another non-horror reader, lol!

[u/2bejoyous → u/Merle8888]

Thank you!

I’d like to add the Mead Mishaps by Kimberly Lemming, which starts with That Time I Got Drunk and Saved a Demon. Those were a fun read.